I appreciate the talk about the importance of political violence; it is so so hard to shake the mainstream left reliance on nonviolent mass “protest” (only effective in very specific conditions which largely no longer exist in the US) vs acts of actual resistance like collective action at work or direct action against uniquely vulnerable targets.
If protests were not effective, then they would have fizzled out already
But this is not true. I think that despite explicitly rejecting this line of thought you’ve accidentally gotten caught. I think that American-style street protests do nothing, and so the ruling class only lightly represses them in order to provide a safe outlet for discontent and ultimate demoralization. For instance, did the massive protests against the Iraq war actually work? What has one year of protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestine actually accomplished? We are too quick to reach for protests when we have better weapons.
We need to look at things in their entirety. Protests are easy to get in to for the average person, and this plants the seed for further actions on their part. The problem with protests is when the organizers start imposing counter-productive rules (such as no party flags at the protest) or don’t use that time to educate. I’ve had major success reaching out to individuals after protests. We need to deprogram them from the thinking that “one-time march = my job is done”, but I also don’t think we can ask people to go from 0 to sabotaging an elbit factory without intermediate steps and victories in-between. They build solidarity and community in that they show us that we’re far from alone.
Pro-Palestine protests in Europe have been much more repressed than in the US, when it’s usually the other way around. Everything moves dialectically and – we owe this to Clausewitz – so does conflict expand dialectically. If a protest was not bothering the establishment, then they would ignore it and eventually the protestors would go home. They would not spend resources to stop it or repress it. This is actually what happened to the Maidan protests in 2014 Ukraine, they were about to end and the false flag sniper attack had to be engineered to give the coup attempt some new momentum.
From being attacked, we know that this bothers the establishment somehow. “To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing”, because it shows that you are annoying them and making enough noise that they have to pay attention to you. Maybe they’re wrong to think marches should bother them; I wrote once that our oppressors are not infallible, they sometimes make mistakes too and we should exploit those mistakes, but above all not think that everything they use to repress us is being allocated efficiently.
There was a debate not long ago, I don’t remember on which platform specifically, about legal vs. illegal protests. The consensus seemed to be (or at least I wanted it to be) that illegal protests are great, but should be made clear to the participants so that they know what they’re getting themselves into if they choose to show up.
Maybe pro-Palestine marches have potential in Europe. This has not been the case in America. In Chicago, pro-Palestine protests drew huge crowds a year ago (I didn’t photograph the crowd size, but it was maybe 5k+ people and several city blocks long when marching). They were held every weekend for months. The accomplishment: City Council passed, via narrowly choreographed vote, a symbolic resolution supporting a ceasefire. No banning of weapons manufacturers, no BDS legislation, nothing real. By late 2024, marches have dwindled to the same 300-500 lefties all trying to get new blood to join their party, with perfunctory police presence since they don’t pose a threat. I don’t have a coherent theory of when peaceful protests are a useful weapon and when they are not. Maybe a demonstration, saying “hey we have thousands of organized people and although we’re peaceful today we won’t be if you don’t meet our demands”, would be powerful. But without an organized left that’s an empty threat; in the US, protests largely serve as a pressure relief valve. Activists say that you can use the “momentum” of protests to make material change. But that’s shown itself to be false for 60 years - if a protest movement has no potential unless it redirects itself, it has no “momentum” to redirect. Joining a crowd of strangers doesn’t build solidarity or community any more than Lollapalooza.
There are some losers who might go to riots and solidify what they are starting to believe (I did in 2020). But overall, as workers develop class consciousness, they will search for methods that work. They want to fight for real. In the US, we’ve seen protest movement after protest movement come and go; anybody paying attention knows that going out in the street to shout at cops doesn’t get anything done. I think the intermediate steps between 0 and sabotaging weapons factories have to be actually-meaningful small wins. In the US, that is probably workplace organizing. For instance at my last job I got everyone to agree not to accept Israeli VC money. Lots of unions have put forward pro-Palestine resolutions of various strength, and UAW did some political strikes in California. The next steps would be, as you said, collective workplace actions that materially oppose the war like refusing to ship weapons.
There are some protests that might work as stepping stones. For instance, the Animal Rights Collective in Chicago (part of CAFT) has been doing small protests in front of clothing stores, only going away once the stores promise to stop selling fur. That works, albeit slowly, but these protests attract only a couple dozen dedicated activists. It’s the way an already-existing organization exerts force, not a mass tactic that will grow the organization. The reason is because these protests are “inefficient”: they don’t actually make use of the participants’ power as workers. It’s just brute force of determination; there’s no path for mass growth.
